Posts Tagged ‘Nicholas Braun’

I’d almost forgotten that the last time Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn teamed up was in 2004’s Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and if you asked me why I like that movie so much and am pretty indifferent on The Watch, I’d be hard-pressed to explain why. Both have very simple premises, feature largely improv performers, and The Watch has the added benefit of Jonah Hill — playing a younger, more broad version of Walter Sobchek.

Then again, Dodgeball had cleverer jokes, Vaughn in the lead (instead of Stiller), and Rip Torn, who trumps pretty much everything in the universe. It also seemed to be having a lot more fun. The Watch, on the other hand, is kind of like the unpopular kid at the playground that’s consigned itself to the tilt-a-whirl: functioning on autopilot and trying to find bits of entertainment when they come. Even the trailer has no qualms revealing the twist of aliens coming to earth, and since there’s not much else after that, for the first half hour or so, we follow Stiller around waiting for the movie to get going.

Red State is a movie filmed straight from the first draft of the shooting script.

Right from the opening shot of a small town, the cuts of scenery are so quick the audience doesn’t even know what they’re supposed to be looking at. Eventually the camera settles on a mother driving her son to school. On the way they pass a group protesting the funeral of a recently murdered homosexual student. Director Kevin Smith finally lingers on a shot of one of the protest signs featuring the phrase “Anal Penetration” in big, bold letters. We see the sign a few times more before the boy gets to school.

When he does, he explains to his teacher (who doesn’t even seem to mind his tardiness) why he’s late, and she launches into some unbelievably clumsy exposition about the group’s leader, Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), a nut of a fundamentalist who’s universally despised around these parts and runs his own private Wacoville just outside of town. It’s also brought up at the murdered boy went to that very high school! Two things should immediately pop out: 1) If the kid went to that school, and was murdered two weeks ago, how on earth is it possible that none of his classmates knew him? And 2) If everyone already knows Abin Cooper, then why spend so much time explaining who he is, what he does, where he does it, why he does it…? The answer, of course, is to fill in the audience, but it’s done in such an amateurish way that you can’t believe it came from writer/director Kevin Smith, who’s not only made eight feature films, not only been writing professionally for nearly 20 years, but who’s also a man who prides himself on the quality of his writing.